|
Tuesday, 10th of May 2011 lols, I just learned how to indent paragraphs in WordPad, which should be useful; I've always considered format to be a big part of readability, which is not to say I always apply it successfully. If only I could work out how to do it in html - for now I'll have to settle for colour instead :( Anyways, before embarking on tonight's project of trying to summarize Monbiot's main points, I might mention an interesting point my father made when he visited a few weeks ago - or rather, my own way of expressing some concepts he mentioned. If Adolf Hitler was among the most villified characters of the last century - racist/xenophobic, militaristic and very right-wing - then surely Mohandas Gandhi is among the most exalted - egalitarian (seeking equality), pacifistic and very left-wing. I don't know a whole lot about Australian politics so I personally can't be sure, but from what I do know my father's comment does ring true that in mainstream Australian politics we've got more space for views not so far off Hitler's end of the spectrum than we do even for views rather more central than Gandhi's end (though Ghandi and probably Hitler weren't the extremes of the spectrum). While that says something about Australian society and politics, I mention it now for a point of reference regarding the 'dictatorship of vested interests' which Monbiot talks of, because I suspect that to some large extent the Australian political arena and media are limited by what will be acceptable to the international markets - essentially the requirements dictated by a few thousand very rich people who want to be richer (perhaps even tens of thousands, as if that makes it better). - - - * The least-worst system - - - There is no reason, Monbiot argues, why the people of the world shouldn't form a democratic parliament to express the will of the world's people. He mentions that even the World Social Forum (gatherings of some 100,000+ folk from around the world) draws, without invitation, representatives of major world governments and institutions - and these are gatherings of unelected activists from mostly wealthier countries! What kind of decisions, and what kind of moral power, might a democratically-elected global parliament wield? Such 'democracy' would be far from perfect, especially in the initial stages when funding and lack of representation from totalitarian-controlled areas of the world will be major issues. But Monbiot suggests no responsibility for this parliament (unless conferred to it later on) beyond expressing as best possible the interests of the world's people, and no powers beyond the simple moral authority of the most genuine (and indeed only) voice of global democracy. Simply forming a body which, as best as possible, represents the will of the world's people far, far better than anything which currently exists is a remarkly revolutionary and yet, once considered, a remarkly obvious proposition. - - - By contrast, the policies encouraged, coerced and enforced by the IMF and World Bank in struggling economies are to reduce government spending on anything but debt repayments to the banks, including cuts to health and education; to control inflation so that prices in the country remain low; to remove barriers to trade and the control of capital; and to privatize many public assets (essentially sale to foreign investors). Even restricting myself to what I can more or less understand, it's obvious that these aren't policies designed to favour the poor countries; Monbiot's (and undoubtedly Stiglitz's, from whom he draws) analysis is considerably more scathing. He describes in some detail how the IMF seems to have done its absolute best to cause and worsen the Asian economic crisis in the late 90s, for example. The handiwork of the IMF and World Bank might best be described by a simple statistic; between 1980 and 1996 the nations of sub-Saharan Africa paid twice the sum of their total foreign debt in the form of interest, but by 1996 they owed three times more than they owed in 1980! Again, the alternative proposal which Monbiot advocates is neither new nor particularly radical. In Britain during WW2 John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the most brilliant economist of the last century, began devising a system which would help the countries worst hurt by the war to rebuild their economies and pay off their debts. Keynes recognised that, burdened by debt and interest payments and with economies damaged by the war, the debtor nations would be hard-pressed to improve their lot by increasing their share of international trade. As is even more the case for poorer nations today (even without the ministrations of the IMF and World Bank), they would be at a significant disadvantage compared with their less affected trading partners (notably the US). But the overall balance of international trade must even out to zero - some countries will import more than they export (losing wealth through trade, or a trade deficit) and some will be in surplus, but we don't have any other planets to trade with. So Keynes devised a system which would prompt nations with a large trade surplus to help solve the problem by reducing their exports and increasing imports - particularly from the nations with a large trade deficit. An attempt to explain it would be too lengthy, and be a poor effort in any case, but as intellectuals at the time realised it was a system which would allow for a general increase in global prosperity without permitting the further impoverishment of poorer nations for the benefit of the rich. Sadly at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 it was not Keynes' International Clearing Union which prevailed as the post-war international body, though according to Monbiot he chaired the conference and is thus often misattributed with its results. The world's strongest economy and biggest lender at the time had much less to gain from an equalised playing field than from an unequal one; and so it was the views of the US Treasury, championed by one Harry Dexter White, which won and lead to the organisations which eventually became the IMF and World Bank. The negotiations also effectively established the US dollar as the currency of international trade, and the interesting subsidies coming from that is one of the reasons the US economy can still function despite being the world's biggest debtor nation - the US debt (as of 2003) was some $2.2 trillion, compared to $2.5 trillion for the whole of third-world debt. (One of the reasons for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the dangerous implications of Hussein's decision to trade oil in euros, rather than dollars; one of the facts I knew before reading Monbiot's book.) Major decisions by both the IMF and World Bank require an 85% majority to pass and, naturally, the United States controls a little over 15% of each. With no possibility of democratic or consitutional reform to the IMF and World Bank, and the blatantly predatory nature of their operations in transferring ever more wealth from the poor to rich, Monbiot suggests what may be the only real possibility for change: The genuine threat of a collective default on their debts by all the poor nations unless their demand for an International Clearing Union (or some other body of course, if by some chance a better option presents itself) is met. Combined with political pressure in the rich world - and especially with the panic the threat, if genuine, would cause in the world's banks and financial markets - our governments would have to accept a smooth transition into an equitable system rather than the devastating crash landing a default on the debts would cause. - - - Some members of the global justice movement, recognising the carbon impact of the transport industry and the gross inequality of the current and past trading relationships between rich and poor countries, have argued for a near-cessation of international trade and the annulment of this obscene debt supposedly owed by the poor world. Monbiot argues that this would be neither practical nor just; removing the debt wouldn't even begin to compensate the colonised countries for the centuries of oppression and theft. (Reading his book one is left with the impression that Monbiot's manifesto will have the poor countries eventually paying the debt back, but hopefully that's a false impression; he doesn't actually rule annulment of the debt out, but considers it's use as a threat against the rich world's financial institutions far too valuable a weapon to be easily surrendered, and if it were to be cancelled, it'd presumably be a little further down the track - the fogginess around this issue is perhaps a notable weakness in the book.) More to the point, limiting international trade would remove the main medium by which wealth might be transferred back to the poor world, short of the paternalism and favouritism which would be implicit in any 'aid' programme of sufficient scale. Monbiot, citing Oxfam, claims that a mere 5% increase in the poor world's share of global trade revenue would amount to some $350 billion per year, seven times the annual flow of aid. Currently governed by the World Trade Organisation, international trade is in many cases yet another means of transferring wealth from the poor world to the rich - and if not that then, at the very least, a means of preventing as much as possible the poor world from getting anything back. To my mind the two key points in this issue are easier to understand than those in the last chapter - government subsidies for industries, and the idea of 'infant industry protection.' An emerging company or industry in the poor world simply can't compete on even terms with those in the rich world, since the latter are larger (thus an economy of scale; it's cheaper to make each item if it's one of a million than if it's one of a hundred), more experienced and have established markets and distribution networks. Thus it's necessary to protect new, 'infant' industries before exposing them to the wider global market as more equal competitors. This is done by imposing tariffs (taxes on imports) which make imported products of the given industry more expensive than the domestic products. But this is a practice largely prohibitted by the WTO regulations. Monbiot, with reference to the work of development economist Ha-Joon Chang, gives some space to showing how the developed western countries applied that very process of infant industry protection through their own development phases in past centuries. He explains Britain and the US in detail, including the fact that high import tariffs helped the industrialising northern US states, while being less advantageous to the southern states more dependant on imports; industry protection, he suggests, may well have been as much a cause for the American Civil War as slavery. Monbiot names only Switzerland, Holland and Belgium as exceptions to this general pattern, for reasons of geography and history which couldn't apply to most countries now. In the last few decades, the truly spectacular economic growth of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea are also discussed as examples of the effectiveness of selecting certain key industries for protection, subsidising and even a measure of government intervention to ensure appropriate growth. In other words, we might essentially view the WTO in many respects as an effort to prevent the industrial and economic development of the poor world (and exposing the neo-conservative / market fundamentalist myth of universal benefits from free trade and a laizzes-faire economy as simply being the best way to expand their own wealth). Government subsidies for industries is another key concept, again in theory prohibitted by WTO regulations. Monbiot states that the wealthier countries have repeatedly assured the poor that every imposition made on them would be matched by the commitments of wealthier nations. As those commitments are consistently broken by the rich countries, the trade talks at Seattle were left unresolved (2000/2001?- I'm sure Monbiot gives a date, but be darned if I can find it, and obviously can't look it up without internet). For example, on the subject of subsidies one of Monbiot's references (#108) is "Oxfam International, 2002b. Cultivating Poverty: The Impact of US Cotton Subsidies on Africa. Oxfam Briefing Paper 30, Oxford." I mention the full reference because of the utter absurdity of the example; in 2002 the United States government gave 3.9 billion dollars in subsidies to a mere 25,000 cotton farmers. Spending three times as much as its aid budget for the whole of Africa, in other words, those worthy workers were awarded an average $156,000 each in that year. Since this allowed the export of American cotton or cotton products at less than the cost of production, the net effect was to reduce world prices by an estimated twenty-six percent. This, in turn, essentially destroyed the livelihoods of millions of cotton farmers in the poor world, who were already living on the edge of desperation. That pattern repeats across many fields of agriculture, and the injustice is amplified not only by the poorer countries' far smaller ability to subsidize if they break the rules also, but especially by the fact that agriculture is far more important to poorer economies; in poor nations agriculture generally gives employment to majorities or near-majorities of their populations, compared with less than one in ten workers in the rich world. Since many poorer nations have tropical conditions and cheaper labour, agriculture is one of the few fields in which they have some competitive advantages against the strong economies in America and Europe - and this is why those wealthy governments offer such huge subsidies to their own industries. And tariffs on imports. Around the same time as the above cotton fiasco, Bangladesh was paying the United States $314 million per year just for the priviledge of selling their garments there; a very poor nation paying the rich for the privilege of a little extra trade income. There's no prize for picking out the pattern of one rule for the rich, another for the poor; while tariffs (industry protection against foreign imports) and subsidies (often used as export promotion) are forbidden by the WTO for the poor world, the wealthy countries indulge them at will. And what's worse, it's not even even-handed discrimination; wealthy countries can impose tariffs on imports from poor countries much higher than they do on other wealthy or semi-wealthy countries, both because wealthier countries have more political clout and because poor countries need to export goods in a desperate attempt to service the absurd debts they owe. And it gets worse, because where a wealthier nation . . . shit, getting late and I'm getting drunk. Trying to say it all - and there's far too much more to say. It's no wonder that trade and WTO meetings draw by far the greatest numbers and vehemence of protest; the issues are more easily understood than the machinations of the IMF and World Bank, and since all nations engage in trade the inequality of outset and injustice in application is far more easily observed. Read the book to begin appreciating the full scope - for now, I'll leave my conclusion until another night. Saturday, 14 May 2011 The other role Monbiot mentions is ensuring that the regulation of multi-national corporations takes place at the global level, rather than assigning that responsibility only to national governments. Companies which have risky ventures run by a subsidiary and simply let it go down if things go awry, companies seeking the lowest possible labour, health and safety or tax standards for their key operations, companies which externalise all their highest costs to the environment, to carbon emissions or to local populations - all of these need to be properly regulated at every level. Before and during their operation at the international level, corporations should be subject to audits of their adherence to such practices by an international body (many of which practices have already been recommended by various bodies). Monbiot cites American professor of business administration Ralph Estes to the effect that, counting only costs established by authoritative studies, US corporations in 1994 inflicted some $2.6 trillion dollars worth of social and environmental damage - some five times their total profits, in other words, and more than the poor world's combined debt nearly a decade later. Whether or not that figure is entirely accurate - certainly I have no way of checking it, and it does seem quite large - even as a ballpark it shows that we need no great leap of the imagination to realise that many, many destructive industries simply could not exist if the costs they externalise (dump on the environment or local populations) were properly accounted. If we started now with the oil industry and other fossil fuels (my example), it'd take massive government subsidies simply to keep the wheels of the world turning, our profligate use of cars and air travel would drastically decline due to cost, and it'd probably be not two years before the virtues of lower consumption, greater efficiency and increased alternative energy sources (including nuclear) became a top priority. - - - But my personal guideline, to 'live such that if all lived as you, all would be well' simply is not sufficient to ensure that humanity prospers or even survives through this century - it's an ideal which we might one day attain, or a bare moral minimum, not a means towards progress. The vast inequalities of wealth and influence - not only between poor and rich countries, but between the workers and the corporate executives, the ultra-rich speculators, the media bosses and the top politicians in rich countries - have created a situation where we are still building our whole economy on quicksand, the fantasy of endless growth on a finite planet. Already this stark reality confronts us in the form of extinction of species, risks to the ozone layer, depletion of international fisheries, widespread deforestation, depletion of fertilizers and the issue of peak oil. But the issue of global warming and the fact that even now there's still little genuine progress towards change in Australia, let alone globally, is perhaps the most dangerous element in this persistant fantasy, and the highest beacon which should be shining through the opiates of television and games, cars and comforts, and all the other hollow trappings of consumerism to warn the masses to get their priorities right. To warn us that it's not an issue for politicians to try and find the right loosely-worded policies and clever speeches which avoid any real conflict with the industries which stand to lose the most from a genuine change - all of politics is based on words for the path of least resistance or greatest gain! It's an issue for us to recognise our personal responsibility, vulnerability and power to force our governments to genuine action; and in struggling towards change on a global issue of greed, theft and ignorance, we can help the spread of ideas between nations and the genuine recognition that the oppression and suffering of others in the world is not something we can afford to ignore. Because ultimately national borders have long ceased to be dividing lines on the exercise of global power, and increasingly we're recognising that neither should they be dividing lines on our loyalties any more than state or shire borders. Rather than letting national loyalties, the influence of the media or personal consumerism blind us into supporting the interests of the world's wealthiest, we should recognise that as citizens of the Earth we should be supporting first and foremost the interests of the Earth and its people as a whole. |